National Film Editor

If chance will make me a king ... Prometheus star Michael Fassbender will play Shakespeare's Macbeth in upcoming film.

Snowtown’s Justin Kurzel will direct a new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with Michael Fassbender (Prometheus) set to play the ruthlessly ambitious Scottish lord and Natalie Portman (Black Swan) his scheming wife.

The film will be produced by See-Saw Films, the company run by Australian Emile Sherman and Englishman Iain Canning with offices in Sydney and London.

The pedigree is impeccable. See-Saw won the best picture Oscar for The King’s Speech in 2011 and most recently produced Jane Campion’s mystery drama series Top of the Lake for pay TV channel UK TV in Australia and the BBC in the UK. It also produced Oranges and Sunshine and Dead Europe (based on Christos Tsiolkas’ novel), and the forthcoming Tracks, starring Mia Wasikowska as ‘‘camel woman’’ Robyn Davidson, who walked through the desert from Alice Springs to the west coast of Australia in 1977.

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UK-based trade paper Screen Daily broke the news, and while See-Saw has declined to make any further official comment, Sherman confirmed the news to Fairfax via email. ‘‘Yes it is true,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Incredibly exciting.’’

Shakespeare’s ‘‘Scottish play’’ has had numerous big-screen adaptations over the years, and See-Saw will no doubt hope to be spared the mythical curse that on occasion appears to have carried over from the theatre to the cinema.

Snowtown director Justin Kurzel with his an AACTA award for best director, last year. Photo: Ben Rushton

The most recent big-screen adaptation was from another Australian director, Geoffrey Romper Stomper Wright. His ambitious $5 million modern retelling, produced by Michael Gudinski’s Mushroom Pictures and with Sam Worthington as a coked-up rock’n’roll-style gangland chief, was savaged by critics and took just $233,000 at the Australian box office when it was released in 2006.

Orson Welles’ 1948 adaptation also struggled. Featuring over-the-top theatrical acting, stagey sets, strange semi-Scottish accents and some comically flimsy props, it was critically mauled on its release and later tampered with by the studio. However, in recent years it has enjoyed something of a revival in restored form.

Perhaps the most successful adaptation, both commercially and critically, is Roman Polanski’s 1971 version. Informed on some readings by the trauma of his wife Sharon Tate's gruesome death at the hands of the Manson Family, his Macbeth was bleak, violent and naturalistic, yet without sacrificing fidelity to Shakespeare's text.

Though it was seen as shocking by many at the time, the legacy of Polanski's film can arguably be seen in the likes of Game of Thrones today. Indeed, it could extend to Kurzel’s version, too; according to Screen Daily, the script by writers Todd Louiso and Jacob Koskoff ‘‘is understood to be a visceral approach to the story including significant battle scenes’’.

The in-demand Kurzel, who is married to Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries star Essie Davis, won best director at the inaugural AACTA awards in 2012 for Snowtown, his feature about the ‘‘bodies in the barrels’’ murder case in South Australia.

He has recently shot a segment of the omnibus feature The Turning, based on a collection of short stories by Tim Winton.

Kurzel has also been linked with an adaptation of John le Carre’s novel Our Kind of Traitor. The fate of that film – which was reportedly to be shot later this year in the UK, France, Russia and north Africa, with Ewan McGregor, Ralph Fiennes and Mads Mikkelsen set to star – is unclear.